The stars of 90s TV favorites were on hand at Connecticut’s Hartford Convention Center over the weekend for the first-ever 90s Con.
Among the stars who sat down to throwback with ABC Audio included Reginald VelJohnson, Kellie Shanygne Williams, Darius McCrary and Jo Marie Payton from Family Matters.
“We’re not just one of the greatest shows of the ’90s,” enthused McCrary, who played Eddie Winslow, “We’re one of the greatest shows of all time!”
Payton offered a hearty “Amen!”
Family Matters ran from 1989 to 1998, first on ABC before a move to CBS for its final season. During the pandemic, the series found a huge new audience via streaming.
“I mean, everything else is horrible, but the cool thing about the pandemic is it drove us all back together,” commented Shanygne. “I think that parents that are our age…they wanted to share…a specific kind of experience with their kids.”
She continues, “When we saw that the show had been streamed over two billion times during the pandemic, that was awesome.”
VelJohnson, the Die Hard veteran who played Winslow family patriarch Carl, is pulling for a reboot, suggesting, “…I’d be a grandfather.” However, he laughed about what that would mean to the show’s most memorable character, played by Jaleel White, “…Urkel’s kids! Oh lord, could you imagine? ‘Did I do that?'” he said, dropping the character’s catchphrase.
Payton, who already stars in the reboot of The Proud Family on Disney+, has one rule: A reboot can’t be like Peacock’s new Fresh Prince re-do, Bel-Air. “I wouldn’t like to go that way because we were not a dramedy. We were a situation comedy,” she declared.
Coincidentally, Saturday Night Live recently dreamed up a gritty Family Matters reboot, called Urkel.
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